im getting many people advertising gross, and horrid advertisements and stupid dating sites. how can i stop these people. is their a way to approve peoples first posts? or like an email confirmation?
You can take different steps there are some mods that might help. If your using 2.0 you can enable captcha which could potentially catch a few early on.
Limiting where they can post, in other words "having a post count of say 30 or so posts before you can post in certain boards" could help too.
The version of SMF your using would really help too. This post will help you as well:
http://www.simplemachines.org/community/index.php?topic=380910
p.s This should of been posted in support.
You could also require activation for new members.
Admin>Members>Registration>Require user to activate the account
Require user email activation and use the captcha, also you can make the password have to have upper and lower case letters and a number.
The automated email activation and captcha are not proving suffecient for my website right now. The last couple of months, we have been getting hammered with spammers that get past this. For a very brief period until going postal on registration approvals, 3 out of 4 registrations were spammers and were making it into active member status. We have had to resort to moderated approval followed by email activations to be able to do some due dillegence with new member registrations.
Probably about 1/3 of the new registrations we are declining right now and usually are banning based on username, email address and/or IP address. First, we use the IP to try and see if it is a legetimate webhost. It is not uncommon for the webhost to not be found or when it is found, it is found to not be legetimate. Or for example, there will be a curious trail such as a china email address, a Luxemburg IP host and an english username. Or for another example, we use google on usernames now and will find that the username has multiple forum registrations in a brief period or that the username is associated with some really weird stuff. I could list some other things that raise flags with our due dillegence but this will give an idea I hope.
Hootowl
If you are using SMF 2.0, use the security questions feature. You can also look at the reCAPTCHA modification if you want something a little better than the built-in image verification.
I use the "stop Spammer" mod. works smashingly!!! 8)
Recaptcha works very well usually. Most sites use it to prevent spam posts, comments etc.